Dapper Dan has waited two long years for this conversation to take place. The visionary independent designer whose work most definitively embodies the 1990s, Helmut Lang was considered an artist long before he decided to become one. His work as a fashion designer is still relevant, though it’s been almost seven years since he left it to focus on sculpture instead. The designer who refined an era now intrigues us with a new spectrum. Continue reading “Helmut Lang talks to Filep Motwary”
Tag: Fashion
Robert Rabensteiner: All Power To The Imagination
Wrapped in a paint-splattered coat in his painterly portrait, Robert Rabensteiner is, nevertheless, not a painter. A famously literate, literary fashion editor, he chose to be photographed in no ordinary clothing. The coat belonged to his hero, Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, better known as Balthus, and is tied with a rope in the style of the late Polish artist. (In Irving Penn’s raffish 1948 portrait, Balthus’s own none-too-clean overcoat is belted with a fiercely knotted piece of near-identical twine.) The brocade-upholstered armchair, too, was Balthus’; the photograph was taken in his vast, mythical chalet in Switzerland. Rabensteiner cultivates an aura in which it is difficult to tell where truth ends and myth-making begins. His wardrobes are poems where others’ are scribbles. Continue reading “Robert Rabensteiner: All Power To The Imagination”
Paolo Roversi talks to Filep Motwary
Paolo Roversi is the past and the future in one. He never set out to be a fashion photographer, though he is one of the most referenced in the world. His is the great paradigm of signature; of identity. He is the only photographer who truly owns his colour palette. The young man who left Italy to conquer, by chance, la mode Parisienne has become the inspirational story of our times. Despite his precision and constancy over 47 years of photography, he continues to surprise. His sweet voice salutes me on the phone; my heart beats faster when I ask my first question… Continue reading “Paolo Roversi talks to Filep Motwary”
Kris Van Assche talks to Filep Motwary
Balancing a nostalgic sensibility with radical modernism, Kris Van Assche has created a distinctive, refined world of nonchalant elegance. His latest show for Dior Homme, for autumn/winter 2011/12, offered a strict outline for the modern man who wants to dress in fluid forms. Boys strolled down the catwalk in wide-brimmed hats and drapey cloaks, chandeliers and fireplaces in the background. The Belgian-born designer graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and moved to Paris in 1998, where he worked with Hedi Slimane at Yves Saint Laurent and then Dior Homme. His own label was first introduced in 2005; two years later, he was appointed artistic director at Dior Homme. Continue reading “Kris Van Assche talks to Filep Motwary”
Siki Im Talks to Angelo Flaccavento
Photography by Erik Madigan Heck
Born in Germany to Korean parents, educated at the Oxford School of Architecture and now an adoptive New Yorker, Siki Im is a master of cross-pollination. After a stint at the radical New York firm Archi-Tectonics, he moved into fashion, first as designer for Karl Lagerfeld and Helmut Lang, then striking out alone with his eponymous menswear label. Since his official debut in summer 2009, he has quietly forged his own sartorial and conceptual niche; it did not take long before he secured the coveted Ecco Domani award for emerging talent. A sharp mind with even sharper scissors, Im works by a process of subtraction, charging architecturally pure forms with an eerie intensity. His mixture of strict tailoring and challenging conceptualism brings to mind the anthropologist Michael Foucault, who once said that the work of an intellectual is “to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will. Continue reading “Siki Im Talks to Angelo Flaccavento”
Takashi Nishiyama talks to Filep Motwary
Photography by Genevieve Majari
Takashi Nishiyama, a 23-year-old designer inspired by computer games and monsters, is the winner of this year’s ITS competition: a seal of approval bestowed by judges including Viktor & Rolf and John Galliano. Nishiyma’s collection features voluminous layers of dark fur, drowning the models in monster silhouettes; it is simultaneously fantasy and nightmare. Continue reading “Takashi Nishiyama talks to Filep Motwary”
Walter Pfeiffer talks to Filep Motwary
Walter Pfeiffer has been making pictures since the early 1970s. His photographs and short films evoke both the glamour and the grit of hedonistic youth. His influence is seen in the work of photographers like Juergen Teller and Wolfgang Tillmans, who have achieved the kind of recognition he has never enjoyed. He has published six books with Ringier and Hatje Cantz: odes to homoeroticism, drama and imperfect beauty, measured out in off-kilter crops and that omnipresent flash. Here, he chats with Dapper Dan from his home in Zurich. Continue reading “Walter Pfeiffer talks to Filep Motwary”
Rei Kawakubo talks to Angelo Flaccavento
Photography by Vassilis Karidis
Rei Kawakubo is, without a doubt, the high priestess of the avant-garde, and Comme des Garçons is the cult she has created. Not only does she possess a religious following and a body of work that spans four decades of uncompromising radicalism, but her cryptic silences, black-clad persona and commanding bob make even her most absurd style declarations – men in skirts being a favorite – sound serious rather than ridiculous.Since Kawakubo arrived in Paris in 1981 with monochrome designs that radically challenged common perceptions of beauty and completely rewrote the staid relationship between clothing and body, nothing has ever been the same again. Hiroshima chic was the not entirely complimentary descriptor bestowed on those early, allblack, hole-y, asymmetric efforts. In hindsight, though, it is apt; Kawakubo’s debut was akin to a creative atomic bomb. And she accomplished all of it without sacrificing commerce on the altar of creativity. Forty years on, she is still the president and owner of her own independent, profitable company. Notoriously a woman of few words, Kawakubo knows how to deliver a resonant sentence. She never draws, preferring words to brief her team. Her latest men’s collection, which features tutus and skeletons, bears the jolly riddle of a title Skull of Life. Continue reading “Rei Kawakubo talks to Angelo Flaccavento”
Yohji Yamamoto talks to Filep Motwary
Photography by Vassilis Karidis
The legendary, and legendarily private, Yohji Yamamoto has recently surprised his fans by publishing a biography. It was co-written by a longtime Yamamoto collaborator, Ai Mitsuda; spanning memoir, fiction and philosophy, it is both more abstract and more deeply personal than a traditional biography.
This March, meanwhile, the V&A in London will pay homage to Yamamoto with a full-blown retrospective. It is, of course, no traditional exhibition, but a series of site-specific installations that lead visitors around the V&A and raise questions about process and permanence. With Yamamoto, the journey is, as ever, the destination. Continue reading “Yohji Yamamoto talks to Filep Motwary”
Dries Van Noten Is A Romantic
Photography by Vassilis Karidis
“Gentle” may not be the most fashionable adjective in the intense, often harsh fashion world. Dries Van Noten, though is an exception: he, and his clothes, are most definitely gentle. Cacophony is not his thing. The subtle blend of romanticism, exoticism and eccentricity that exudes from any piece of clothing with his label on it; the cozy atmosphere of his eclectic shops, conceived not as temples but as houses or bazaars; the dreamy air of his shows, which are forays into a parallel dimension of pure, multi sensory joy: all of this comes from someone who expresses himself in whispers rather than shouts. “There is so much of myself as a person in the things I create, it’s almost scary,” he says with a laugh. “Sometimes I feel like I am baring it all in front of the audience.” The serene flow of his speech is accented by a piercing Belgian “r”. When he talks, he looks straight into my eyes. This is the first time I have met the famously reserved Van Noten in person, and it is the man, not the designer, who I hope to get to know. Continue reading “Dries Van Noten Is A Romantic”